Tommy Hilfiger Europe Uses Sterling Commerce's E-invoicing Solution
Premium retailer Tommy Hilfiger Europe has selected Sterling E-invoicing to automate its buyer electronic invoicing processes. With Sterling E-invoicing, Tommy Hilfiger reduces the cost of its cross-border and domestic trading by automating customer invoicing processes and extends those benefits to its community of business partners.
Tommy Hilfiger’s accounts receivable department processes on average 33,000 invoices per month from 4,000 customers. The company sought to improve profits by ensuring all invoices are processed accurately in order to be paid on-time and in-full. An end-to-end audit of accounts receivables processes found that invoices cost approximately one euro each to print and post internationally and additional costs were incurred through lost receipts and man-hours to rectify errors and chase-up receipts. To achieve its objectives, Tommy Hilfiger wanted to reduce the error rate in its invoice processing and speed up payments.
Sterling E-invoicing ensures automated tax and regulatory compliance across multiple countries. The system also archives invoices to meet specific country requirements, offers audit and reporting tools to accommodate tax authorities’ audit and enquiry demands and provides signed PDF authentication and non-repudiation services globally. Sterling E-invoicing can be deployed on-premise or as-a-service. Tommy Hilfiger opted for the on-premise E-invoicing deployment to integrate tightly into its SAP system.
“To us, e-invoicing is the future of invoicing and we wish to be among the first companies in our industry to offer this service to our customers,” said Frederick Kolff, vice president of credit management, Tommy Hilfiger. “Sterling Commerce offers a terrific solution that improves the speed, accuracy and efficiency of our invoicing process and ensures compliance with all safety and auditing regulations in the various countries where we operate. As a result, our invoicing costs will reduce and our DSO [days sales outstanding] will improve. Equally important to us is that we can have a positive impact on the environment from e-invoicing due to the huge amount of paper we will save.”